Bought an Xserve this April and my first drive of 1TB is now full. I just went over to Microcenter and bought a 2TB SATA Barracuda drive to stuff in the second bay. Buy it only when you need it and I only paid $189 for 2TB. Now that I poke a flashlight in the Xserve and see how the first drive is mounted I see I need an Apple mount which cradles the drive inside the tin drawer and allows it to just slide in as a hot swappable drive. I also noticed while looking at the Xserve on the Apple site and saw "up to 3TB" which means three 1TB drives in the bays but that is only because Apple does not sell a 2TB right?

So I have three questions:

1) What is the name of this mount which installs an HD into an Xserve?

Yikes, the "hard drive module tray sled carrier HD" for a G5 xserve is selling for 155 on Ebay. It sure looks like it is the only thing I need to slip TWO TB into one of these bays. But all searches only point to 1TB with maximum 3TB for the Xserve. I need more. 5TB would do. So I need to get one of these sleds which look to not be a common part so they won't be at the Apple Store. Apple looks like they want to sell the sled and the HD together only.

But 300 bucks for just 1TB? Get real. If the sled cost 155 plus my 189 I can get 2TB in this thing for $344. More like it.

So I have answered #2 NO, and got the name so #1 is done. Jury still out on #3 but I cannot imagine a server is limited to 3TB.

Ah but I don't think that is true. I think you could buy three of the xserve sled modules and load the up with the nice economical 2TB a pice HDs and you would then have six total TB.

But here is why I am instead going to the Apple site and buying a 1TB with sled module. I won't void the Apple warranty. The only reason. I don't want to hear,"oh, you bought the sleds separately and used 2TB third party? We don't cover that." They weill say they pick the super groovy cream of the crop drives for server class level specs and it is all BS.

Currently they only sell 1TB drives that have been blessed by Apple and come with the sled so they are hot swappable into the xserve. The sled is necessary. Apple says that the 1TB is max. It isn't because you are right, they are scalable.

What this means is my Xserve has a 3TB top end and my tower does not. I need more than that. What I should have done is use a tower as my ftp server. Hard to go back now. Or at least a tad inconvenient.

So I take it as you can only get the sled when you buy a Apple drive and the sled is not sold separately ? Sorta does not make sense for Apple to limit the sales of extra drives to only 1 TB , I mean you can sell a 2 TB drive for more bucks then a 1 TB drive , right.

Unless Apple wants you to start stacking and racking with more Xserves with the 1 TB limit - seems like a bad business model though ?

I ordered a $300 1TB drive with sled from Apple yesterday and just slid it into the Xserve. It appears on the shared screen before I climb the stairs back from the data center.

So on the street I could get a 1TB for $100 plus the sled for $155. Close enough. The fact that I could pop the 1TB out of the sled and pop my 2TB ($189) into it is the only thing that irks me. The way my data are expanding right now I will need to pop another drive into the last bay in less than 6 months. Hopefully Apple has a 2TB with sled or greater size by then.

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